Video game to movie translations haven’t had the best of histories, since, well, most of them are pretty bad.  It’s a distinct challenge for the filmmakers to try and take what made people love the games in the first place and translate it into a marketable film, not quite as easy a task as possible as the public (and more importantly the video game nerds who are likely to pack said films theaters) can be fickle, if not downright hostile towards any slight upon their beloved genre.  Most often filmmakers try to take the basic characters and themes of the game and make them into something new that hardly resembles the original game that people grew to love.  Classical examples like Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon, Wing Commander and Street Fighter (though it is a personal guilty pleasure of mine) fit this bill perfectly, while I’m not even going to get into the works of the great Dr. Uwe Boll.  The Resident Evil series at best has split the genre fans, leaving many wondering if there ever would be a great movie made from a video game.  So, when the earliest trailers for Silent Hill came around, many thought that it would be the savior of the video game based movie genre.  Based on one of the most well known and atmospheric survival horror series around, Silent Hill had a lot to live up to, and though I know little about the source material, I can’t help but feel a bit let down by the end result.

I’d go into describing the plot, but, well, given that the better portion of the movie didn’t seem to have a very coherent plotline, I don’t know if I could do it justice.  Long story short, Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) and her husband adopted a strange girl prone to active nightmares and sleepwalking.  Looking to alleviate the problem, Rose takes her daughter on a road trip back to the place she keeps screaming about in her dreams... Silent Hill.  Well, as movies like this tend to go, it’s not a happy go lucky sort of road trip, as they are soon plunged into the depths of hell in a town overrun by monsters, demons and strange cults.  Rose has to be one of the most determined mothers in quite a while, as she goes through what could be called hell itself to get her daughter back.

Now, from the start it’s evident that Silent Hill was designed to be as close to a video game as possible.  There exists within it a more or less linear path, taking us to unique locations that could essentially be called levels while strange baddies appear at random intervals to scare and/or try to kill the films various heroines.  While in good hands this could have been a great idea, Silent Hill kind of throws you into things with very little explanation, then throwing in a huge expository “HEY LOOK AT ME, I’M EXPLAINING EVERYTHING YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED” montage later into the movie.  If you need a six minute long scene to explain why everything is as weird as it is, it kind of removes the need for the rest of the movie.  Additionally, much like a video game, the dialogue is sparse and somewhat stilted, but given that few of the characters are really compelling to begin with this is to be expected.  With a story confusing and people that are hard to care about, Silent Hill has a hard time making itself strong with its story.

Where Silent Hill excels however is in making one of the most uniquely terrifying atmospheres I can recall.  Let’s face it, for lack of a better word this town is real messed up, and the production design team (from both the practical and digital side) has done everything possible to make this town look as hellish as possible.  Be it the constant ash fall, the general decrepit quality or even just the lighting, the town of Silent Hill is a flat out creepy place that just pervades the feeling that evil could be lurking around any and every corner.  When the darkness sweeps in and transforms the lightness of the town into something ever the more sinister, the films appearance takes an all the more terrifying turn.

The creature work I must also admit was incredibly well done, as none of the macabre creations seem to have any basis in this earth.  The eerie humanoid face of the carnivorous cockroaches, the jerky movements of the nurses, the perverse glee that surrounds the janitor, whenever any of this films monsters are onscreen, there is a general sense of terror and unease about them.  They are truly the films highlight, which is unfortunate as they don’t spend nearly as much time on them as they should have.  Whenever the creatures of darkness were onscreen, they owned their time and made things frightening, yet they decided to spend a lot of time on exhibition for a cult that was pretty self-explanatory.

Silent Hill could have been a great film if they knew which direction they wanted it to go in, but in the end it remains just another of the many video game to film adaptations that did an average job at best in being a compelling movie.